


The Telltale Heart

by mumuinc



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Duo has a lot of other issues not related to the war, F/M, Gundam pilots have a shit-ton of trauma to work through, Horror, M/M, Post-Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz, Preventers (Gundam Wing), Relationships Are Messy, everyone's grown up to adulthood wow
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-12 05:48:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29005581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumuinc/pseuds/mumuinc
Summary: In AC210, Duo Maxwell is divorced and grounded on L2 until he's relearned how to be a person again after the death of his child, the loss of his career, the breakdown of his marriage, and the splintering of his friendship with the other pilots. Of course, that's when the mission comes in, wouldn't it?
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	The Telltale Heart

**Forget the power of technology, science and common humanity. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for there is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter and the laughter of thirsting gods.**

**Warhammer 40000**

* * *

One of the things that attracted him to space was the inescapable fact that out there, in the vast vacuum of black nothingness, comm silence was a given thing, one taken for granted. No one expected you to know things, to hear things, to respond to things if you were out there, whether suited up in a vacuum suit or floating around in zero-g in a ship’s bridge.

Back in the days of the war, incomunicado while out in space had been a hard thing to swallow. He’d loved being in the thick of things, and G, for all that the old coot had been the Pestilence to his God of Death, had never skimped on information. Unlike the other doctors who’d guided and trained the other pilots, G believed the smart-talking stowaway little street rat he’d taken in and honed into a trained killer was smarter than your average sniveling little colonist brat. G had never shied from telling him the grimdark of the future he’d been grooming him into, and at the same time, had never discouraged him from forming his own opinions, shaping his own man as it were, about the atrocities they were getting ready to commit.

It was a vast change now from how he’d had to jump through hoops and practically beg Howard for the salvage jobs that took him out to the depths of space so far from any settled colony, any satellite to bounce any sort of communication media as to keep him out of loop for hours on end in a day cycle. It wasn’t that there was a lot less space debris to clean up. In an age where space travel, colony-building and the terraforming of planets, the cleaning up of waste humankind have either created or jettisoned into space by way of blowing massive shit up are all not only common, everyday activities, but ultimately a major necessary human process to support the explosion of a population Earth would not have reliably been able to support, the Sweepers were a critical function of the well-oiled machine that was space travel. Salvage jobs had initially petered out in the early years after the Eve Wars, what with many privateers discovering the lucrative goldmine that was salvage, but as the colonies started expanding again, and the Mars project kicked off, the Sweeper network was again inundated with work.

Duo wasn’t interested in any of the jobs that would take him anywhere near the major hubs of civilization on the colonies, and it was just as well. Many a pilot were spooked by jobs that took them to Mars and the asteroid belt, and that was Duo’s bread and butter, and just as well; he liked keeping himself out of the loop these days.

The problem was that these clean-up jobs were taking him further and further to the outer reaches of the solar system. The problem was that many of those jobs were complex work, typically requiring a team of people. A team of people Duo did not have, and preferred not having. The problem was Howard thought he was being reckless. Impulsive. If Duo hadn’t been a Gundam pilot in his youth, Howard would have called the work he did suicidal.

So here he was now, grounded, out of a ship for at least a month until, as Howard had sternly told him, he relearned the value of human life. Specifically his own.

Grounding didn’t use to be a chore. There’d been a time in his life when piloting hadn’t been such a massive part of his adult life. That chapter seemed like it was light years away now, and he felt a little bit like how he’d felt when he’d been grounded back in the war. Piloting had been the one thing in G’s training that he’d taken to like a duck to water. It had been liberating to be at the helm, to hold the yoke that drove him towards his destiny, back in those early days of the war, and getting stuck on the ground, even on safe ground with ironclad aliases to keep him out of the fighting when he didn’t have his best weapon on hand, especially in the unfamiliar blue dome of the Earth’s sky overhead, had always felt like a bad rash he couldn’t wait to shake. Hilde had told him it made him unreliable. He thought he just didn’t want to be shackled.

And shackled he was, especially stuck in the dilapidated shack he called home out here on the remnants of a once-lucrative salvage yard in the mean no-name streets of L2 V08744. The colony functioned as little more than a prison for him, and on more than one occasion, Howard had advised him to abandon the bolthole and setup a new one on Earth, where at least he could expect a minimum of six months of actual sunlight instead of the artificial UV that L2, which spent majority of its time in revolution on the dark side of the moon, had for its day cycle. It might even help with his depression.

Duo snorted as he reached for the torque wrench. The salvage yard saw little to no shipment from the Sweepers these days with salvage and repairs of whatever functional equipment retrieved being sent on one of the bigger yards out on Lunar Base, and instead functioned more as an auto mechanic bay for the ancient rusted buckets that passed for motor vehicles on L2. Even now, fifteen years after the Eve Wars, and almost twenty since he’d stowed away on a Sweeper ship to escape the unforgiving streets, V08744 was still swimming in squalor. Oh it was nothing like it had been when he’d run the streets as a small child, but Duo had been to a great many other colonies in his short life. None of them had been quite anything like his home colony.

 _What has to be the armpit of the united Earth Sphere,_ he thought wryly as he straightened up from the hood of the car in his bay. It was old and beat up, but it had a working engine, and the doors still locked, and that, if anything, was more than enough for L2. He wasn’t even getting paid for this work—Leslie, one of the few female pilots in Howard’s stable of Sweepers, and the only other person to hail from L2, had dropped off the ancient Chevy in his bay, told him to get the carburetor fixed, and then taken off on his ship.

Leslie had been rather brusque when she usually was rather on the flirty side when dealing with the younger men in their group, especially once she found out that Duo was a free agent for some years now. If Duo’s history hadn’t been so well-known among the Sweepers by now, he would have been hurt. As it were, he hadn’t been surprised. The news about PeacemillionXT had been a hot topic on the newscasts that even the relatively insular and isolated group that made up the Sweepers knew the gossip about the ship’s reappearance near Neptune, some eight years after it disappeared off the face of the universe on its maiden voyage. And with PeacemillionXT on the news, Duo knew his face had to be plastered on every television and vidscreen on every ship, colony and satellite across the entire Earth Sphere.

It was entirely the reason why he was grounded now, more than anything else, he suspected. The gander at the asteroid belt was just Howard’s smokescreen to try to keep the inevitable breakdown he expected Duo to have on hearing about PeacemillionXT happen on safer, stable ground, instead of out alone on some harebrained job halfway across the solar system.

It was also entirely unfair. The news broke a week ago and there hadn’t been tears, slashed wrists, or fellating of gun barrels in his recent past, unlike the year the ship first disappeared.

He was _fine_. Just. Fucking. Peachy.

He huffed as the sound of his cellphone pinging filled the still, silent air of the yard. The thing hadn’t stopped pinging with emails, texts, and the endless stream of calls Wufei believed was necessary to get Duo back into Sank and working on the PeacemillionXT recovery. He’d already told him he wasn’t interested unless it came through the Sweeper network as a salvage job, and from what he recalled from seeing snippets of various newscasts, XT was operational, if incapacitated. It wasn’t a salvage job that needed doing, but a rescue mission, and Duo had had his fill of rescue missions for more than a lifetime. Half of the ones he’d been involved in had never ended well; it would just be better for everyone if his name wasn’t attached, especially not on this one.

He hadn’t capitulated even when Wufei, his face shadowed and seemingly prematurely lined with stress and worry that Duo could see through the crackle of a terrible vidcall connection, had told him quite plaintively, “We need you.”

And Duo had never said no to Wufei. Or to any of the other pilots. It was why it was necessary to completely disappear and cut himself off from them eight years ago, so he could break down in private; Wufei and Quatre would have never stopped pestering him if they’d seen him back then. Once upon a time, they’d been his brothers, and though the years had chilled the attachment he’d felt for them, it hadn’t thawed his desire for them to recognize him as family. He sort of wished they’d returned his regard, one way or the other, but a life lived in peace tended to cool the fire of bonds forged by war and blood, and the Earth Sphere had been at peace for fifteen years now. There’d been no need for the sort of band of brothers that the Gundam pilots had once been. There was Preventer to handle the shit that cropped up after all. And anyway, his estrangement had mostly been his fault. With having his losses and that stupid court marshal televised, it had been all he could take not to have the people whose attention and respect he valued, sometimes even over his life, not to see him succumb to the torture of his demons.

The sound of the wrench knocking over his tool box as he tossed it masked the incessant pinging of his phone for a moment as he propped the hood down and grabbed a rag. He was filthy, his knuckles skinned from working on Leslie’s piece of shit machinery for hours, since the day cycle started, and his coveralls seemed to be more grease stain than polyester. He was sure if he bothered with a mirror, he’d have grease and sweat all over his face and any other exposed skin. His hair felt like L2’s mutant rodent population had nested in it.

It was a few hours yet before business hours ended, but it didn’t look like there would be any further business to be had, at least not in these parts of the colony, where the obtaining of edible food was the order of the day over maintaining half-functioning machinery for most of the local population, and he still had paperwork to be done for the pre-colony era Miata that had been dropped off two days ago. He’d finished that one the day it had arrived in his bay; he had a knack for the svelte and swanky cars of collectors, even if it was on the rather careworn side.

He’d only managed to put away his tools and was going to lock up the yard when the tinkle of chimes alerted him of a new customer. Since he didn’t see a vehicle parked out at the gates, he took his time to lock up, figuring that whoever it was in the office was probably more of the inquiring sort and not the rushing for some relief for their overheating car sort, and could wait the few minutes it took to bolt down the gates, and lock up the bay.

He wasn’t prepared for the sight of strawberry blond hair swept back in a neat waterfall braid, or the twinkle of blue eyes, the tentative curve of a pretty smile.

“Hello, Relena.” He had to marvel at the calmness of his voice when all the alarms inside his head were blaring klaxon-loud fear-laced chaos at the sight of the ESUN Foreign Minister and the princess of the Sank Kingdom, standing and looking supremely out of place in the tiny, cramped office that Duo maintained at military order.

Relena Peacecraft, all neat cream pantsuit and nude heels, shifted, a bit uncomfortably as he gestured for her to sit in the lone visitor’s chair across the rickety desk piled with work orders and receipt pads. The tentative smile on her face wobbled into uncertainty for a moment at the cool tinge in his voice, and Duo had to smile privately, as he threw himself into his own swivel office chair, the one luxury he allowed himself on this godforsaken dump. Relena followed suit and sat primly.

“I’d shake your hand but I don’t think you’d want any grease on your suit.” He smiled deprecatingly, his tone moving towards disarming, an automatic response whenever he talked to women who looked remotely like they might be distressed. _Must be another instinct leftover from the war_ , he mused to himself. He sure as hell hadn’t had enough experiences after that to cultivate such a response. Hilde had never allowed him to consider her as any sort of damsel in distress at any point in their marriage, and Duo hadn’t had enough experience with the opposite sex since then to form any response beyond weary exasperation when dealing with them.

Upping the charm worked well with Relena, however, especially as she hadn’t had any exposure to his presence in over half a decade since he left Earth. Well, as well as it would if said charm was smeared with a healthy layer of axle grease. She still looked utterly uncertain, her eyes darting to the side, where the glass door leading out to the street was firmly shut, and she nibbled her lip for a moment, as if wondering why in the world she’d found herself here, before she pressed her lips in a firm sort of girding of the loins moment.

“I’m sorry for… showing up out of the blue,” she said quietly. Duo only nodded. Relena Peacecraft was not a person who generally had time for social calls, he surmised, not with the sort of work that came with placating countries and colonies alike as a day job, and especially not for social calls with people like Duo Maxwell. The two of them hadn’t not gotten along when they’d met the few times during the war, though their worlds tended to gravitate in the same circles, but they hadn’t been friends either, not by a longshot.

His smile widened as he watched her squirm. He had a pretty good idea what she wanted from him. And he had a pretty good idea she was going to leave his office in tears. “What can I do for you, princess?”

“I—“ Relena paused and bit her lip some more as she seemed to recognize the wicked glint Duo knew had to be in his eyes, before she seemed to finally steel herself for what she had to say, and his inevitable response. “You’ve heard about the distress signal Preventer received from the PeacemillionXT.”

His grin danced to a knife’s edge. “Hard not to when one’s name seems to be inextricably tied to why that ship is in trouble in the first place.”

Relena recoiled from the statement, even when told in the most amiable voice Duo could muster whenever that ship’s name was ever uttered to his face. “I—I know you must think it utterly callous of me to ask this of you especially after—“

“Stop.” The word was out before he could clamp his mouth shut. No one talked to him about _that_. Especially not her.“What do you want from me, Relena? The plans for XT? The blueprints so Preventer can mount this godforsaken rescue mission the news has been blathering on for days? I don’t see what else you could possibly need from me. I took a copy of the plans; I didn’t erase it from the ESUN or Preventer records.”

She shrank back as his voice mounted a tone that wanted to brook no argument, but maybe it had been something in his eyes, or perhaps it was the sight of the strip of pale skin on his left ring finger that prompted a rallying of her resolve, but she forced herself to settle, to lean back into his space across the desk. “It isn’t that! You know it isn’t! Duo, it’s my brother out there! My brother and my sister-in-law, the only family I have left. Please! We need you on this mission!”

“The only family—“ He couldn’t stop the derisive laugh that snorted out of his mouth. “How dare you come here and ask that of me! Maybe you don’t remember that _I_ lost the only family I had no thanks to that fucking ship, or hadn’t you forgotten?”

“Heero wasn’t—“

“The hell he wasn’t!” he shouted, completely losing his composure, and he had to suck in a breath to reach back for calm. No, he wasn’t going to be goaded into talking about Heero Yuy, because talking about Heero Yuy inevitably led to talking about _her_ , and the hell Duo was ever going to talk about Helen to someone like Relena. “Look, you have the plans for the ship, the blueprints, all the design specs I wrote up, the mods I made from G’s original. You have an entire fucking agency at your beck and call to hire the best engineers and scientists your money can buy. You do not need me, Ms Peacecraft.”

She shook her head. “That’s where you’re wrong, Duo! Can’t you see? I could hire someone, yes, they’d probably make sense of the designs well enough to plan and mount that rescue mission, but Duo, they won’t be _you_. You built that ship from ground up. You understand it better than anyone else ever could, not even Quatre.” She sighed when the hard set of his mouth didn’t change. “Please Duo, we need you. I—I know there’s very little I can do to… to change what’s already past, but… please, Milliardo is the only family I have left. I _have_ to try, I have to do something to save him.”

He didn’t want to give in. Giving in was like… like dishonoring her memory, like her death meant nothing to him. Like he could turn around and just… just forget the promises he’d whispered into her tiny, cold, dead hands. He’d said he would be done with Relena. With Heero. With Preventer and the ESUN government. They’d sucked out what life he could have had with her, and when that life had been hanging by the flimsiest thread, they’d gone and taken her away from him, in the most permanent manner there ever could be. He’d fucking failed to save her life. He was her father and he’d failed at every fucking turn where she’d been involved, but… he wasn’t heartless. And in his heart of hearts, he knew… neither was she.

“What do you want from me, Relena?” he asked again, resigned now, defeated. He could feel his bones creaking as his spread his dirty fingers over the papers waiting to be filed on his desk, and he watched the knobby, skinned knuckles of his hands, compared them against the fair, dainty skin of Relena’s hands, clasped firmly together on the other side of the desk. She had a rock the size of an asteroid on her left ring finger. He wanted to call her a liar. She had a family; it seemed she was well on her way to make one… But a husband wasn’t the same as blood.

“The rescue mission isn’t going to be headed by the Preventers,” she said quietly, her eyes lowered, as if she couldn’t meet the anguish he knew must be lurking just behind the sweep of his own eyelashes. “I… The Sank Kingdom is mounting the rescue mission, and I would like for you and Quatre to lead it.”

He sighed as he wiped his face with his hands, as if he could wipe the choked feeling building in his throat with the action. The only thing he probably achieved was spreading more of the grease onto his face, and mentally, in that quiet, forlorn corner of his mind where he kept the box of memories that held his dead, he whispered a silent prayer for her. His Helen. His baby, whose memory he was about to betray.

“You’re fucking selling your soul to the devil is what you’re doing, Relena.” He huffed when she turned shining, hopeful eyes at him. “I hope you know that.”

* * *

**Between the stars the ancient unseen enemies of mankind wait and hunger. Every voyage into the nothing is a confrontation with horror, with the implacable things of the warp, and with man's own innermost fear.**

**Warhammer 40000**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is an experimental piece of work. I enjoyed reading the horror/mystery fic in the GW tag and thought to write one based on my favorite horror movie of all time, _Event Horizon_. If you've seen that movie, then you have an idea of how the story is supposed to go, but at the same time, I have no idea which direction the characters will take this story to. I took the premise of the movie, yes, but the horror? We'll have to see what I can come up with, I suppose, since I'm never known for planning anything that happen in my fics.


End file.
